Friday, October 28, 2016

Heritability of heterozygosity offers a new way of understanding why dominant gene action contributes to additive genetic variance

Lab meeting paper for Tuesday November 1st 2016 at 10.00.

linkAbstract. Whenever allele frequencies are unequal, nonadditive gene action contributes to additive genetic variance and therefore the resemblance between parents and offspring. The reason for this has not been easy to understand. Here, we present a new single-locus decomposition of additive genetic variance that may give greater intuition about this important result. We show that the contribution of dominant gene action to parent–offspring resemblance only depends on the degree to which the heterozygosity of parents and offspring covary. Thus, dominant gene action only contributes to additive genetic variance when heterozygosity is heritable. Under most circumstances this is the case because individuals with rare alleles are more likely to be heterozygous, and because they pass rare alleles to their offspring they also tend to have heterozygous offspring. When segregating alleles are at equal frequency there are no rare alleles, the heterozygosities of parents and offspring are uncorrelated and dominant gene action does not contribute to additive genetic variance.

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About us

We are a group of evolutionary biologists consisting of three PI:s (Jessica Abbott, Erik Svensson and Tobias Uller), and several postdocs, PhD-students and Master's students. We focus on ecology and phenotypic evolution, and topics as sexual selection and sexual conflict, epigenetic effects, frequency-dependent selection, and speciation processes in natural populations.

Research approaches include experimental evolution, quantitative genetics, experimental field studies of natural and sexual selection, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Our main study organisms are mainly invertebrates (insects, isopods, flatworms), although we also study lizards and birds.